Unfair advantage???

One of the words I try to keep OUT of my vocabulary is the word unfair. Why? Because many days my life in America could be characterized that way, so I simply choose to focus (most of the time) on the many ways my life is blessed instead.

So when I interviewed a month ago for an Adjunct Faculty position at a local nursing school and was told by my interviewer that my having a tutoring business was not only a potential conflict of interest, but unfair to the students competing with the students I tutor, my mouth just hung open. WIDE open. Because it was truly the most ridiculous thing I had heard recently.

The woman I interviewed with who had a PhD in Psychology and was on faculty at the nursing school was down right adamant that my work outside the position was highly unfair her exact words, to other students seeking admission to the school. But given that 90% of my clients are not only minorities, but some of them under-represented minorities, I wondered in what world would ANY minority student have an "advantage" in anything in America by working with me. Outside of having family members on the Acdom, of course. Now what I thought she was really trying to imply was that I would cheat for my students to help them do well/gain admissions to the nursing school. But what she was blithely unaware of was the fact that I don't cheat for anyone and certainly not the students I work with for two very simply reasons. I'm a person of strong integrity (otherwise I'd still be employed in death pharma) and my students don't need to cheat because we are just that damned good!!! Then it got me thinking about how SUPER ridiculous her concern was when I realized that I tutor students in Bioinformatics too but no one from my current department ever questioned that when I was accepted into the program and later offered a teaching assistantship.

My feeling was that she had a problem with the fact that I had a very specific and VERY well communicated goal of increasing minority representation in the health professions. In fact, I explicitly state that on my website. So yeah I admittedly do go waaaaaayyyyyyy out of my way to help my students but never once have I given a thought to cheating to help them achieve their goals. Because I don't have to, 'cause WE GOT THIS!!!!